Once on a path to medical school, Courtney Bell altered course after spending two life-changing years teaching in rural North Carolina. Today, she is director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research — and planning new ways to bolster its impact.
After earning an undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College, there were few indications that Courtney Bell would one day take a career path leading her to become the director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research — one of the oldest, largest, and most productive education research centers in the world.
“I was fascinated by my education classes but at the time I was pre-med,” says Bell, who earned a BA in chemistry from the Ivy League institution.
Yet before applying to medical school or perhaps pursuing a graduate degree in chemistry, Bell explains how she needed a break from schoolwork before figuring out her future. It was the spring of 1996 — and her next steps would change her life in profound ways.
Teach for America, only a couple years old at the time, was recruiting standout college graduates to teach in urban and rural schools with chronic teacher shortages. What initially caught Bell’s interest was that the program provided a stipend through AmeriCorps — funding she could use to help pay off student debt. While that financial incentive wasn’t a deciding factor, it pushed her to seriously consider Teach for America’s pitch.
“It felt like something worth doing,” says Bell, who enrolled and ultimately spent two years teaching high school science in a small, rural district in North Carolina.
It was a great experience, she says, but also exhausting because the structural challenges her students faced could not be fixed by one teacher.
Before long, Bell again started thinking seriously about her future. She moved to New York City to live with her best friend and got a job at Columbia University in New York doing immunology research. She applied to medical school and was accepted.
But she also applied to graduate schools of education.
“I just couldn’t shake the inequities I saw while teaching,” says Bell. “It made me outraged that our public education system was failing those young people through no fault of their own. It sounds trite but I honestly thought, ‘We’ve got to find a way to change the system.’ ”
Bell adds: “It was because of my students that I didn’t follow the path of medical school and becoming a doctor.”
So in 1999, she started pursuing a doctorate in curriculum, teaching, and educational policy from Michigan State University.
Drawn to education research
After earning her PhD in 2004, Bell jumped onto the academic path and took a position as an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education.
Both Michigan State and UConn are Land Grant institutions that take teacher education very seriously, notes Bell. It felt like a great fit. Among her responsibilities at Connecticut was teaching a course titled “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” — a state requirement for all pre-ser- vice teachers.
“It’s a course where you begin to help novice teachers who frequently are white, middle-class women understand issues such as structural racism, sexism, language diversity, and ableism,” says Bell. “Teaching bright, commit- ted students I was convinced that my students were learning — but I was also convinced that they would be unlikely to create classrooms that were more equitable than the ones they experienced when they were students. I could see my students ‘doing school’ and getting good grades in their courses, but I wanted to figure out how to make their learning more impactful to the students they would ultimately teach. I wanted to understand both what my students believed, and what they could do.”
So Bell applied to programs that could help her learn how to measure and make sense of both what teachers know and can do. In 2007, she received a prestigious American Educational Research Association and Educational Testing Service (ETS) Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Measurement.
“I went to go work at ETS to try to figure out how to measure what these beginning teachers are learning,” says Bell.
Bell’s arrival at ETS — the world’s largest private, nonprofit educational testing and assessment organization — led to another significant turn in her career path. With ETS, she pursued a new line of research focusing on how to look into classrooms using different measurement tools to understand what’s taking place.
In 2008, she left UConn to move full steam ahead into the research world, taking a position as associate research scientist at ETS.
She started working within the Research and Development Division’s Teaching and Learning Research Group. Over the next decade-plus, she took on increasing responsibilities across ETS, and in 2018 became a principal research scientist with the Research and Development Division’s Global Assessment Center. There, she was part of a team of education experts, researchers, and assessment developers dedicated to advancing quality and equity in education across the world.
When the position posting for a new director at WCER became public in the fall of 2019, Bell was made aware of the job from a recruiter and colleagues alike.
“Initially, I wasn’t particularly interested in a new job,” she says. “WCER has long been famous in my realm of education research — but I had only ever been a consumer of its insights. When I saw the position description — with its focus on equitable education and improving educational outcomes for diverse student populations — it made me pause.”
Bell ultimately pursued the position. Percival Matthews, who co-chaired the WCER director search and screen committee, explains how Bell made a very quick and impactful impression during the interview process.
“It was incredible to see how people reacted to Courtney’s public interview,” says Matthews, who is serving as the School’s interim associate dean for equity, diversity, and inclusion, and is an associate professor with the Department of Educational Psychology. “Person after person raved about how she interacted with folks. She is about empowering people, which just happens to be a university’s greatest resource. Leaders who can resonate with people have special potential.”
At the end of a rigorous national search and interview process, Bell was named the new director of WCER in January 2020, and started the position in the midst of a pandemic in July of that year.
“Courtney is an extraordinary educational leader and researcher,” School of Education Dean Diana Hess said in naming Bell as the next director of WCER. “Her background as a high school teacher, a faculty member, a leader of complex and innovative research teams and projects, and principal research- er with ETS uniquely prepares her to be an excellent leader of WCER.”
Building excellence and playing to WCER’s strengths
The UW–Madison School of Education is world- renowned for the quality and impact of its research — and WCER is a significant player in these efforts.
WCER generates more than $65 million in awards and services annually. At any given time, the center is home to roughly 140 grant-funded projects and employs about 500 people — including more than 100 graduate students.
It’s a large, complex organization that would take a good deal of time for a new leader to get to know and understand during the best of times. Most of Bell’s first year with the organization, however, was spent working remotely due to campus-wide COVID-19 safety protocols.
“For a long time, I had only met the vast majority of people virtually. At times it felt like I was playing the role of director on a TV show,” Bell says of the nearly non-stop virtual meetings.
While much of the School of Education’s research enterprise was maintained during the pandemic — even seeing a 16 percent jump in research awards to the School in 2020-21 — COVID-19 was nonetheless dealing a significant blow to WCER. WIDA, which is housed in WCER and is the largest fee-for-service entity in the School of Education, was limited in delivering some of its vital, in-person services.
WIDA provides language development resources to educators of multilingual learners. Its core product is a suite of English language proficiency assessments taken annually by English language learners (ELLs) in kindergarten through 12th grade in 41 states and territories. Called ACCESS for ELLs, the assessments are designed to be administered in person — and due to COVID-19 health and safety concerns, the number of tests being taken during the 2020-21 academic year was reduced by approximately 40 percent.
While WIDA expects to be able to support its consortium members fully this year, the revenue losses from 2020-21 and an ever-shifting research landscape require attention to strategy.
“Courtney’s range of experiences in educational leadership have made her the ideal person to move WCER forward in these challenging times,” says Tim Boals, the founder and director of WIDA. “What I really love about Courtney is her willingness to listen and collaborate.”
To help WCER move forward and continue to thrive, Bell says she is focusing her leadership in a couple key areas.
First, she is looking inward to make sure WCER is providing the highest quality core services. There are more than 40 full-time professionals in WCER dedicated to this important work, which includes comprehensive administrative and technical support for the lifecycle of a grant — from award submission through project startup, staffing, data collection, technological support, reporting, and more.
While providing these core services is a must, Bell notes that it’s impossible for WCER to be a one-stop- shop for everything. So she is equally committed to looking out and across the School and campus to identify other pockets of excellence that principal investigators and project staff can tie into.
Finally, Bell stresses the need to look outward — beyond campus — to keep on top of what’s currently happening in the realm of education research and where the field might be heading five, 10, and 15 years down the road. As one example, Bell talks of the need to diversify research funding opportunities. She is working with Brenna Graham of the Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association, who has been helping the School of Education since 2019 in building new relationships with philanthropic foundations.
Bell also says WCER and UW–Madison have some built-in advantages that can help its research enterprise moving forward. In particular, she notes the Wisconsin Idea — the principle that the work of the university should influence people’s lives beyond the boundaries of the classroom and campus.
“One of our comparative advantages is we have a tremendous number of people who are committed to and enjoy collaborative work with other researchers and with practitioners in our communities,” says Bell. “That is not true in every institution.”
Bell similarly notes the strength of, and many connections to, the broader University of Wisconsin System.
“All of the universities across the UW System have teacher education programs that are serving schools from urban to suburban to rural,” says Bell. “Many of our neighboring states don’t have systems that organize campuses and provide ways to collaborate and work together like we have here. Being a part of the UW System is a wonderful advantage.”
Finally, Bell highlights WIDA as another significant asset for WCER, noting its access to a trove of data on multilingual learners that provide a wealth of longitudinal performance information. She says WIDA houses the best data in the world on how young people learn English and that “WIDA’s research expertise gives us the ability to investigate questions that no one else can.”
Bell still committed to her students
While Bell is no longer entrenched in her own re- search full time, she continues to leave her mark in important ways.
In November of 2020, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) announced at its Paris headquarters the findings of an international education study unique in its scope and research methods. Bell played a leading role in the study’s success by designing observation systems that can identify teaching practices used around the world. The Global Teaching InSights: A Video Study of Teaching — also called the TALIS (Teaching and Learning International Survey) Video Study — looked directly into the classrooms of 700 teachers across eight countries and economies to capture on video how each taught the same mathematics topic to their students.
Bell’s team created the first standardized observational instruments used to measure teaching and learning of the same unit of secondary mathematics instruction across multiple countries.
And in November 2021, Bell was named to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s (NASEM) new committee of 15 experts charged with a big task — making science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education equitable for all in the PreK-12 system.
Bell was chosen from more than 350 nominations to be part of the National Academies’ Committee on Equity in PreK–12 STEM Education. This panel includes teachers, researchers, and scholars in a range of aca- demic disciplines focused on the science of learning, cultural inclusivity, and improved teaching of STEM subjects for historically underserved children.
Colleagues at WCER note how such work is central to Bell as a researcher and leader.
“Her intentional focus on equity and justice have been personally inspiring,” says Mariana Castro, WCER’s deputy director. “With her as our leader, these values have become our lens for our daily work and critical decisions we face.”
“Courtney’s commitment to changing education for the better, especially for diverse learners, is real and always at the forefront of her efforts,” adds WIDA’s Boals, who also co-chaired the WCER director search and screen committee.
Bell, who also is a faculty member with the highly regarded Department of Educational Psychology, was finally able to start working in person on campus over the summer of 2021. Since then, she has become increasingly entrenched in the School of Education community and in her work as director of WCER.
All of these efforts are rooted in her teaching experience in rural North Carolina from more than a quarter of a century ago.
“Those students changed me in a way I couldn’t ignore,” she says.